Grim outlook for Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier
New science briefing summarises results of the ambitious international collaboration to study Antarctica’s most worrying glacier
Cambridge: A vast area of the Antarctic Ice Sheet continues to retreat as a UK-US group of scientists reveal new findings about how and when it might suddenly move towards collapse.
Since 2018, researchers have uncovered a complex, rapidly changing environment at the remote Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Scientists from the UK and US are meeting at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge this week (16-20 September) to discuss their observations and study results.
Prior to the start of the project, named the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), little was known about the mechanisms controlling the retreat of this enormous glacier – one of the largest and fastest-changing glaciers in the world. If it collapsed entirely, sea levels would rise by 65 cm.
Thwaites Glacier spans an area equal to the island of Great Britain or the US state of Florida, and in places is over 2000 m (over 6,500 feet) thick. The volume of ice flowing into the sea from Thwaites and its neighbouring glaciers has more than doubled from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the wider region, called the Amundsen Sea Embayment, accounts for 8% of the current rate of global sea level rise of 4.6 mm a year.
